to cease to change is to lose place in the great race. Looking back over
history, we see times of change and progress alternating with other
times when life and thought have settled into permanent forms. Such was
the condition of the Greeks through many ages before the Persian wars,
and such, again, became the condition of Europe when the Northern
nations grafted religion and the laws of the Western empire on their own
hardy natures.
A condition of things differing alike both inwardly and outwardly from
that into which a happier fortune has introduced ourselves, is
necessarily obscure to us. In the alteration of our own characters we
have lost the key which would interpret the characters of our fathers.
But some broad conclusions as to what they were are, however, at least
possible to us. A rough census taken at the time of the Armada shows
that it was something under five millions.
The feudal system, though practically modified, was still the organising
principle of the nation, and the owner of land was bound to military
service at home whenever occasion required. All land was held upon a
strictly military principle. The state of the working classes can best
be determined by a comparison of their wages with the price of food.
Both were as far as possible regulated by Act of Parliament. Wheat in
the fourteenth century averaged 10d. the bushel; beef and pork were
1/2d. a pound; mutton was 3/4d. The best pig or goose could be bought
for 4d.; a good capon for 3d.; a chicken for 1d.; a hen for 2d.
Strong-beer, which now costs 1s. 6d. a gallon, was then a 1d. a gallon,
and table beer was less than 1/2d.
A penny at the time of which we write must have been nearly equal in the
reign of Henry VIII. to the present shilling. For a penny the labourer
could buy as much bread, beef, beer, and wine as the labourer of to-day
can for a shilling. Turning then to the question of wages, by the 3d of
the 6th of Henry VIII., it was enacted that the master, carpenters,
masons, bricklayers, tilers, plumbers, glaziers, joiners, and others,
employers of skilled workmen should give to each of their journeymen, if
no meat and drink was allowed, sixpence a day for the half year,
fivepence a day for the other half; or fivepence-half penny for the
yearly average. The common labourers were to receive fourpence a day for
the half year; for the remaining half, threepence.
The day labourer received what was equivalent to something near twenty
shillings a week, the wages at present paid in English colonies; and
this is far from being a full account of his advantages. The
agricultural labourer held land in connection with his house, while in
most parishes there were large ranges of common and unenclosed forest
land, which furnished fuel to him gratis, where pigs might range, and
ducks and geese, and where, if he could afford a cow, he was in no
danger of being unable to feed it; and so important was this privilege
considered, that when the commons began to be largely enclosed,
Parliament insisted that the working man should not be without some
piece of ground on which he could employ his own and his family's
industry.
By the 7th of the 31st of Elizabeth it was ordered that no cottage
should be built for residence without four acres of land at lowest being
attached to it for the sole use of the occupants of such cottage.
The incomes of the great nobles cannot be determined for they varied
probably as much as they do now. Under Henry IV. the average income of
an earl was estimated at £2,000 a year. Under Henry VIII. the great Duke
of Buckingham, the wealthiest English peer, had £6,000. And the income
of the Archbishop of Canterbury was rated at the same amount. But the
establishments of such men were enormous. Their retinues in time of
peace consisted of several hundred persons, and in time of war a large
share of the expenses was paid often out of private purses.
Passing down to the body of the people, we find that £20 a year and
heavy duties to do for it, represented the condition of the squire of
the parish. By the 2nd of Henry V. "the wages" of a parish priest were
limited to £5 6s. 8d., except in cases where there was a special license
from the bishop, when they might be raised as high as £6. Both squire
and priest had sufficient for comfort. Neither was able to establish any
steep difference between himself and the commons among whom he lived, so
far as concerned outward advantages.
The habits of all classes were free, open, and liberal. In frank style
the people lived in "merry England," displaying the "glory of
hospitality," England's pre-eminent boast, by the rules according to
which all tables were open to all comers without reserve. To every man,
according to his degree, who chose to ask for it, there was free fare
and free lodging. The people hated three things with all their
hearts--idleness, want, and cowardice.
A change, however, was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction
of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era.
Chivalry was dying; the abbey and castle were soon together to crumble
into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, and convictions of the
old world were passing away never to return. A new continent had arisen
beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth
itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in
the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they
had so laboriously built for themselves mankind were to remain no
longer.
_II.--The Fall of Wolsey's Policy_
Times were changed in England since the second Henry walked barefoot
through the streets of Canterbury, and knelt while the monks flogged him
on the pavement in the Chapter House, doing penance for Becket's murder.
The clergy had won the battle in the twelfth century because they
deserved it. They were not free from fault and weakness, but they felt
the meaning of their profession. Their hearts were in their vows, their
authority was exercised more justly, more nobly, than the authority of
the crown; and therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was
compelled to stoop before them.
The victory was great, but, like many victories, it was fatal to the
conquerors. It filled them with the vanity of power; they forgot their
duties in their privileges, and when, a century later, the conflict
recommenced, the altering issue proved the altering nature of the
conditions under which it was fought. The nation was ready for sweeping
remedies. The people felt little loyalty to the pope. The clergy pursued
their course to its end. They sank steadily into that condition which is
inevitable from the constitution of human nature, among men without
faith, wealthy, powerful, and luxuriously fed, yet condemned to celibacy
and cut off from the common duties and common pleasures of ordinary
life.
Many priests spent their time in hawking or hunting, in lounging at
taverns, in the dissolute enjoyment of the world. If, however, there
were no longer saints among the clergy, there could still arise among
them a remarkable man. In Cardinal Wolsey the king found an adviser who
was essentially a transition minister, holding a middle place between an
English statesman and a Catholic of the old order. Under Wolsey's
influence, Henry made war with Louis of France in the pope's quarrel,
entered the polemic lists with Luther, and persecuted the English
Protestants.
Yet Wolsey could not blind himself to the true condition of the church,
before which lay the alternative of ruin or amendment. Therefore he
familiarised Henry with sense that a reformation was inevitable.
Dreaming that it could be effected from within, by the church itself
inspired with a wiser spirit, he himself fell the first victim of a
convulsion which he had assisted to create, and which he attempted too
late to stay.
Wolsey talked of reformation, but delayed its coming. The monasteries
grew worse and worse. Favoured parish clergy held as many as eight
benefices. Bishops accumulated sees, and, unable to attend to all,
attended to none. Wolsey himself, the church reformer (so little did he
really know what a reformation means), was at once Archbishop of York,
Bishop of Winchester and of Durham, and Abbot of St. Albans. Under such
circumstances, we need not be surprised to find the clergy sunk low in
the respect of the English people.
Fish's famous pamphlet shows the spirit that was seething. He spoke of
what he had seen and knew. The monks, he tells the king, "be they that
have made a hundred thousand idle dissolute women in your realm." But
Wolsey could interfere with neither bishops nor monks without a special
dispensation from the pope. A new trouble arose from the nation in the
desire of Henry to divorce Catherine of Aragon, who had been his
deceased brother's wife, was six years older than himself, and was an
obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom. Her sons were dead, and
she was beyond the period when more children could be expected. Though
descent in the female line was not formally denied, no queen regent had
ever, in fact, sat upon the throne; nor was the claim distinctly
admitted, or the claim of the House of York would have been
unquestionable. It was, therefore, with no little anxiety that the
council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes
were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few
days of their birth.
The line of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak
from her childhood. If she lived, her accession would be a temptation to
insurrection; if she did not live, and the king had no other children, a
civil war was inevitable. The next heir in blood was James of Scotland,
and gravely as statesmen desired the union of the two countries, in the
existing mood of the people, the very stones in London streets, it was
said, would rise up against a king of Scotland who entered England as
sovereign.
So far were Henry and Catherine alike that both had imperious tempers,
and both were indomitably obstinate; but Henry was hot and impetuous,
Catherine cold and self-contained. She had been the wife of Prince
Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII., but the death of that prince occurred
only five months after the marriage. The uncertainty of the laws of
marriage, and the innumerable refinements of the Roman canon law,
affected the legitimacy of the children and raised scruples of
conscience in the mind of the king. The loss of his children must have
appeared as a judicial sentence on a violation of the Divine law. The
divorce presented itself to him as a moral obligation, when national
advantage combined with superstition to encourage what he secretly
desired.
Wolsey, after thirty years' experience of public life, was as sanguine
as a boy. Armed with this little lever of divorce, he saw himself in
imagination the rebuilder of the Catholic faith and the deliverer of
Europe from ecclesiastical revolt and from innovations of faith. The
mass of the people hated Protestantism as he, a true friend of the
Catholic cult, sincerely detested the reformation of Luther. He believed
that the old life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering
the ground, might bloom again in its old beauty. But a truer political
prophet than Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those
poor men who were risking death and torture in disseminating the
pernicious volumes of the English Testament.
Catherine being a Spanish princess, Henry, in 1527, formed a league with
Francis I., with the object of breaking the Spanish alliance. The pope
was requested to make use of his dispensing power to enable the King of
England to marry a wife who could bear him children. Deeply as we
deplore the outrage inflicted on Catherine, and the scandal and
suffering occasioned by the dispute, it was in the highest degree
fortunate that at the crisis of public dissatisfaction in England with
the condition of the church, a cause should have arisen which tested the
whole question of church authority in its highest form. It was no
accident which connected a suit for divorce with the reformation of
religion.
_Anne Boleyn_
The Spanish emperor, Charles V., gave Catherine his unwavering support,
and refused to allow the pope to pass a judicial sentence of divorce.
Catherine refused to yield. Another person now comes into conspicuous
view. It has been with Anne Boleyn as with Catherine of Aragon--both are
regarded as the victims of a tyranny which Catholics and Protestants
unite to remember with horror, and each has taken the place of a
martyred saint in the hagiology of the respective creeds. Anne Boleyn
was second daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, a gentleman of noble family.
She was educated in Paris, and in 1525 came back to England to be maid
of honour to Queen Catherine, and to be distinguished at the court by
her talents, accomplishments, and beauty.
The fortunes of Anne Boleyn were unhappily linked with those of men to
whom the greatest work ever yet accomplished in this country was
committed. In the memorable year 1529, after the meeting of parliament,
events moved apace. In six weeks, for so long only the session lasted,
the astonished church authorities saw bill after bill hurried up before
the lords, by which successively the pleasant fountains of their incomes
would be dried up to flow no longer. The Great Reformation had commenced
in earnest.
The carelessness of the bishops in the discharge of their most immediate
duties obliged the legislature to trespass in the provinces most purely
spiritual, and to undertake the discipline of the clergy. Bill after
bill struck hard and home on the privileges of the recreant clergy. The
aged Bishop of Rochester complained to the lords that in the lower house
the cry was nothing but "Down with the church." Yet, so frightful were
the abuses that called for radical reform, that even persons who most
disapprove of the reformation will not at the present time wonder at
their enactment, or disapprove of their severity. The king treated the
bishops, when they remonstrated, with the most contemptuous disrespect.
Archbishop Cranmer now adopted a singular expedient. He advised Henry to
invite expressions from all the chief learned authorities throughout
Europe as to the right of the pope to grant him a dispensation of
dissolution of his marriage. The English universities, to escape
imputations of treasons and to avoid exciting Henry's wrath, gave
replies such as would please him, that of Oxford being, however, the
more decided of the two. Most of the continental authorities declined to
pronounce any dictum as to the powers of the pope.
_The Fall of the Great Chancellor_
The fall of Wolsey was at hand. His enemies accused him of treason to
the constitution by violating a law of the realm. He had acted as papal
legate within the realm. The parliaments of Edward I., Edward III.,
Richard II., and Henry IV. had by a series of statutes pronounced
illegal all presentations by the pope to any office or dignity in the
Anglican Church, under a penalty of premunire. Henry did not feel
himself called on to shield his great minister, although the guilt
extended to all who had recognised Wolsey in the capacity of papal
legate. Indeed, it extended to the archbishops, bishops, the privy
council, the two houses of parliament, and indirectly to the nation
itself. The higher clergy had been encouraged by Wolsey's position to
commit those acts of despotism which had created so deep animosity among
the people. The overflow of England's last ecclesiastical minister was
to teach them that the privileges they had abused were at an end.
In February, 1531, Henry assumed the title which was to occasion such
momentous consequences, of "Protector and only Supreme Head of the
Church and Clergy of England." The clergy were compelled to assent.
Further serious steps marked the great breach with Rome. The annates, or
first fruits, were abolished. Ever since the crusades a practice had
existed in all the churches of Europe that bishops and archbishops, on
presentation to their sees, should transmit to the pope one year's
income. This impressive impost was not abrogated. It was a sign of the
parting of the ways.
Henry laid his conduct open to the world, declaring truly what he
desired, and seeking it by open means. He was determined to proceed with
the divorce, and also to continue the reformation of the English church.
And he was in no small measure aided in the former resolve by the
recommendation of Francis, for the French king advised him to act on the
general opinion of Europe that his marriage with Catherine, as widow of
his elder brother Arthur, was null, and at once made Anne Boleyn his
wife. This counsel was administered at an interview between the two
kings at Boulogne, in October, 1532.
The pope had trifled for six years with the momentous question, and
Henry was growing old. At the outset of the discussion the pope had
said: "Marry freely; fear nothing, and all shall be arranged as you
desire." But the pontiff, reduced to a dilemma by various causes, had
fallen back on his Italian cunning, and had changed his attitude,
listening to the appeals of Catherine and her powerful friends. And now
he threatened Henry with excommunication.
Henry entered privately into matrimonial relations with Anne in
November, 1532, and the marriage was solemnly celebrated, with a
gorgeous pageant, at Westminster Abbey in the following January. On July
24 the people gathering to church in every parish read, nailed to the
church doors, a paper signed Henry R., setting forth that Lady Catherine
of Spain, heretofore called Queen of England, was not to be called by
that title any more, but was to be called princess dowager, and so to be
held and esteemed. The triumph of Anne was to last but three short
years.
_Protestantism_
Wycliffe's labour had left only the Bible as the seed of a future life,
and no trace remained in the sixteenth century of the Lollardry of the
fourteenth. But now Protestantism recommenced its enterprise in the
growing desire for a nobler, holier insight into the will of God. In the
year 1525 was enrolled in London a society calling itself "The
Association of Christian Brothers." Its paid agents went up and down the
land carrying tracts and Testaments with them, and enrolling in the
order all who dared risk their lives in such a cause.
The Protestants thus isolated were waiting for direction, and men in
such a temper are seldom left to wait in vain. Luther had kindled the
spark, which was to become a conflagration in Germany, at Wittemberg, on
October 31, 1517, by his denunciation of indulgences. His words found an
echo, and flew from lip to lip all through Western Europe. Tyndal, an
Oxford student, went to Germany, saw Luther, and under his direction
translated into English the Gospels and Epistles. This led to the
formation of the "association" in London. The authorities were alarmed.
The bishops subscribed to buy up the translations of the Bible, and
these were burned before a vast concourse in St. Paul's Churchyard. But
Wolsey had for two years been suppressing the smaller monasteries.
Simultaneously, Protestants were persecuted wherever they could be
detected and seized. "Little" Bilney, or "Saint" Bilney, a distinguished
Cambridge student, was burnt as a heretic at the stake, as were James
Bainham, a barrister of the Middle Temple, and several other members of
the "association." These were the first paladins of the reformation, and
the struggle went bravely forward. They were the knights who slew the
dragons and made the earth habitable for common flesh and blood.
As yet but two men of the highest order of power were on the side of
Protestantism--Latimer and Cromwell. These were now to come forward,
pressed by circumstances which could no longer dispense with them. When
the breach with the pope was made irreparable, and the papal party at
home had assumed an attitude of suspended insurrection, the fortunes of
the Protestants entered into a new phase. The persecution ceased, and
those who were but lately its likely victims, hiding for their lives,
passed at once by a sudden alternation into the sunshine of political
favour.
Cromwell and Latimer together caught the moment as it went by, and
before it was over a work had been done in England which, when it was
accomplished once, was accomplished for ever. The conservative party
recovered their power, and abused it as before; but the chains of the
nation were broken, and no craft of kings or priests or statesmen could
weld the magic links again, Latimer became famous as a preacher at
Cambridge, and was heard of by Henry, who sent for him and appointed him
one of the royal chaplains. He was accused by the bishops of heresy, but
was on trial absolved and sent back to his parish. Soon after the tide
turned, and the reformation entered into a new phase.
Thomas Cromwell, like Latimer of humble origin, was the "malleus
monachorum." Wolsey discovered his merit, and employed him in breaking
up the small monasteries, which the pope had granted for the foundation
of the new colleges. Cromwell remained with the great cardinal till his
fall. It was then that the truly noble nature which was in him showed
itself. The lords had passed a bill of impeachment against
Wolsey--violent, vindictive, and malevolent. It was to be submitted to
the commons. Cromwell prepared an opposition, and conducted the defence
from his place in parliament so skilfully that he threw out the bill,
saved Wolsey, and gained such a reputation that he became Henry's
secretary, representing the government in the House of Commons, and was
on the highroad to power.
The reformation was blotted with a black and frightful stain. Towards
the end of April, 1536, certain members of the Privy Council were
engaged in secretly collecting evidence which implicated the queen in
adultery. In connection with the terrible charge, as her accomplices
five gentlemen were arrested--Sir William Brereton, Mark Smeton, a court
musician, Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, and, the accusation in
his case being the most shocking, Lord Rochford, the queen's brother.
The trial was hastily pushed forward, and all were executed. The queen,
who vehemently and piteously appealed to Henry, passionately protesting
that she was absolutely innocent, was also condemned, and was beheaded
in public on Tower Hill.
Henry immediately after the tragedy married Jane, daughter of Sir John
Seymour. The indecent haste is usually considered conclusive of the
cause of Anne Boleyn's ruin. On December 12, 1537, a prince, so long and
passionately hoped for, was born; but a sad calamity followed, for the
queen took cold, and died on October 24.
In 1539 monastic life came to an end in England. The great monasteries
were dissolved; the abbey lands were distributed partly amongst the old
nobility and partly amongst the chapters of six new bishoprics. On
January 6, 1540, was solemnised the marriage of Henry with Anne,
daughter of the Duke of Cleves, and sister-in-law of the Elector of
Saxony. This event was brought about by the negotiations of Cromwell.
The king was deeply displeased with the ungainly appearance of his bride
when he met her on her landing, but retreat was impossible. Though Henry
was personally kind to the new queen, the marriage made him wretched.
Cromwell's enemies speedily hatched a conspiracy against the great
statesman. He was arrested on a charge of high treason, was accused of
corruption and heresy, of gaining wealth by bribery and extortion, and,
in spite of Cranmer's efforts to save him, passed to the scaffold on
July 28, 1540. For eight years Cromwell, who had been ennobled as Earl
of Essex, was supreme with king, parliament, and convocation, and the
nation, in the ferment of revolution, was absolutely controlled by him.